Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2016
By way of introduction, I suggest you consider for a moment of four aircraft as dissimilar as a small general aviation aircraft, a large transport such as the Airbus, a glider and finally a fighter aircraft such as the Tornado. As regards handling in the air of these widely differing flying machines, their most significant common quality is perhaps that they can all be flown by a human pilot.
In the definition of the desirable handling qualities of these aircraft, one might—in complete innocence—expect to find a description of such desirable qualities in terms of the behaviour, capabilities and limitations of the human pilot, which one would, of course, expect to be independent of class or category of aircraft.